


The Naked Light

by wintergrey



Series: The Blood-Dimmed Tide [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Attraction, Blood, Combat, Death, Gen, Sexual Tension, Violence, deafness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 13:35:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1690202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/pseuds/wintergrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It’s not beautiful, Clint doesn’t care what people say about it. Horrifying. That’s what it is. The inhuman speed, the unflinching cruelty, all of it horrifies him."</p><p>Clint can't sleep after his long-range encounter with the Black Widows. Instead he reviews what he's seen until he understands, for better or for worse, what just happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naked Light

Clint sprawls in his bunk, eyes fixed on the shadows of the bed above, and switches off his hearing implants with a thought. A muscle twitch, really, but he only has to think about it to do it these days. Immediately, the world disappears to a dull thrum of feedback inside his own head. He closes his eyes and tries to sleep.

Sleep won’t come and the red dot of his scope haunts him, dances across the dark inside his eyelids. He’s not a good assassin. Killer, maybe. Marksman, certainly. But not an assassin. Who am I killing? The red dot bounces along the words.

He’s back in his perch above the ruins. Can’t see Pym die from here, hears the shot and knows what it is. His overwatch assignment is an aid convoy moving from the docks to midtown. He contacts the command centre in the moment he knows there’s trouble—it’s no accident that an IED reroutes the convoy out of sight down a side street—and gets his orders back as he’s dropping to the ground for an all-out sprint across cracked streets and rubble.

“Do not lose the cargo, Barton.” Agent May’s tone is neutral but there’s force behind her words. “If you think we’re going to lose it, you paint the target and call in a strike.”

Scorched earth isn’t their usual policy but Pym’s work—whatever it is—is too important to fall into enemy hands. Sacrifices have to be made. Clint keeps telling himself that. No one in this war signed on to survive this thing, at least no one on their side. He pushes himself hard to get there but he’s only human. Two blocks away, he hears gunfire.

“Do not try to take them out.” That’s Coulson on the comms now. “You won’t get them both.”

Try to take them out? If Clint’s lungs weren’t burning, he’d laugh. He’s going to be lucky to get close. This isn’t even uneven terrain, it’s an enemy in and of itself. It’s jutting concrete sprouting twisted rebar lances, it’s thirty-foot crevasses into a water-filled sub-basement so deep he’d never make it out alive, it’s fields of shattered glass and precarious bridges of I-beams.

At least he knows where he’s going. The corner of an apartment building towers over the target zone. Clint fires an arrow upward, uses the line attached to make it to the tenth story. By the time he’s sighting the convoy again, it’s almost all over.

This is the first time he’s seen the Black Widows in person instead of on a screen. On the screen, they look like film magic, digital editing and stunts woven together to create a spectacle. This is real, seen down his sights through a fading veil of gun smoke that he can taste in the back of his throat.

It’s not beautiful, Clint doesn’t care what people say about it. Horrifying. That’s what it is. The inhuman speed, the unflinching cruelty, all of it horrifies him.

“Painting it,” he says as the golden-haired one splits a man from crotch to throat with a knife like he’s made of paper. Not paper, though. Blood and entrails spill out through the split. “Heat ‘em up.”

The other one, red hair like a shroud, pulls down a pair of goggles and begins to a search of the bodies. Bodies. It’s all bodies, there’s nothing left alive down there but them. He can’t think about that. He shifts to the laser guidance system he’s carrying and sights the area, holding his breath. The laser light is nearly invisible except for the fine dust that always blows when it’s dry, concrete particles chafed away from broken edges by the wind. If one looks too closely, it glitters.

“Target locked,” Agent May says crisply. “Packages are in transit.”

The golden-haired one is crouched on the blown-out window sill of what used to be a hospital, seemingly oblivious, the one searching gives no indication she knows anything at all. She’s crouched down over one of the bodies, working on it.

“I think they have it. Hurry up,” he says to whoever’s listening.

“T-minus three,” May says.

The red-head looks up, looks at the palm of her partner as though she’s reading it.

“Two.”

She grabs her partner by the wrist, a motion that’s almost human in its desperation.

“Delivery.”

The whole kill box erupts in fire and debris. The light is so bright against the falling dusk that Clint is left sightless for a moment.

“Agent Barton, proceed to the rendez-vous,” Coulson orders.

Clint is blinking the after-images from his eyes when he spots something in the smoke, a shadow or a ghost rising toward the heavens. He’s not sure what it is but his instincts want him to believe it’s something human.

“I should confirm,” he says. “I’ll head back when the dust settles. Besides I can’t see a damn thing right now.” It’s not quite a lie.

“Taking that overwatch thing a little too seriously, are you?” Coulson’s voice is dry but Clint knows amusement when he hears it, knows that set of Coulson’s shoulders that’s as good as laughing.

“Thought you disapproved of blinking, Coulson,” he fires back. “Never see you do it.”

“Don’t make us come get you, Barton. That’s an order. Coulson out.”

Clint folds away the targeting laser into a bundle he can carry slung across his back and pulls out his rifle. It’s not his favourite tool but, for this, the sight on it is excellent. His eyes are far better than most and the sight amplifies it tenfold. The gathering dark is a nuisance instead of an obstacle.

When the clouds are low and the city has power, it’s as though the sun never sets for him. Some people credit his deafness for his barely-human eyesight. He doesn’t draw that connection, though. He’s always been like this, even when he could hear. Losing his hearing just made it matter that much more. He sees nearly everything, sees too much when he wishes he didn’t—seeing is almost the wrong word, it’s all so clear to him.

He’s about to call it a day when something moves and he begins tracking it until it takes shape in his eyes. If he weren’t so sure of his own abilities, he’d think he was imagining what his mind tells him is down below.

“Barton to Bus. Anyone home?”

“Coulson here. Don’t tell me you need a ride, Barton. This isn’t actually a bus, remember?”

“They made it.” Clint can see them clearly now, moving purposefully through the remains of the chapel that was once part of the ruined hospital.

“Say again.” There’s no humour in Coulson’s voice now.

“I have them in sight. Two Widows. Red and gold, moving north by northwest. Halting.” The redhead pushes up her goggles and then unzips her black suit at the throat to slip something into the dark between her breasts. “Moving. Same trajectory.”

“Fall back, Barton. You’ll never get them both.”

“That’s what they kept telling me about these two cheerleaders, back in—”

“Barton.”

“I can do this.” He draws a bead on the blonde first, maybe because of the way he had to watch her eviscerate a soldier and dump his guts out while the poor bastard watched. The red light traces her thigh as he gets a feel for her tempo.

“Barton, I’m ordering you to break off. This mission is over.” Coulson sounds scared under his frustration. Somewhere in the back of his head, Clint is aware that he’s just this guy stranded in the middle of nowhere with two of the world’s most notorious killers—and he’s about to piss them off. His finger tightens on the trigger.

In the time it takes for an impulse to spark along the neuron chain from his brain to his hand, his target is gone, gone and replaced by something new. He recontextualizes, realizes the red-head has thrown herself in the path of his bullet. And that, that changes everything for him.

He pulls his sight along the track of her zipper, over the dark shadows of her cleavage, up the bloodied and filthy column of her white throat, over her red lips and straight nose to the point just above and between her green, green eyes.

She stares back at him as though she sees him even through the dark and the dust and the distance, and what is behind her eyes is no mind-wiped killer. There is fear there, and anger, and courage—a person lies behind those eyes and Clint can see the whole of her for a heartbeat that might as well be a month or a year or a lifetime.

In the eternity packed into that moment, it feels as though he knows her and she knows him. In the flare and contraction of her pupils, the catch of her breath, the flutter of her pulse in her throat, there is an entire correspondence. The stillness of his finger on the trigger, the way his muscles refuse to respond to his better judgment, the way his heart stutters, all of it adds up to a stack of letters written in his scratchy, impatient script, tied up with string, and post-marked for somewhere north of Moscow.

She moves so swiftly and smoothly that even Clint’s reflexes stumble as he tries to react. His rifle scope explodes in a shower of glass and burning lines streak his face. That’s going to leave a mark. Even as he is sliding down the line he used to reach his perch, fearing for his vision, a rush of admiration hits him.

It’s only now, back in his bunk, staring into the dark and tracing his wounds with his fingertips that he understands the level of her calculations. At that distance, a bullet from her gun wouldn’t have done more than shatter his scope. A hair’s breadth to her right, a change in angle so small as to be beyond measuring by any human sense, and she could have shot him straight through his unprotected eyesocket.

Not a warning shot, though. Not the way she moved. Not the way she was trained. Clint can see the message behind the bullet as clear as day in the naked light of his hindsight.

Thank you.

 

 


End file.
